I just learned about the “Strumphosentanz” (panty hose dance) through a neat, brief article by Robert Gonzalez on i09, and after being mesmerized by the video, learned that this optical illusion dance is relatively common. A YouTube search reveals numerous performances, but I like the fact that the one sampled above is also SHOT in black-and-white, echoing the uncanny way that photography and video are inherent re-presentations — doubles for reality — and capable of giving life to something that is inherently not there, not present, at all.

All film is uncanny by that logic. But in the Strumphosentanz, there is also a peculiar way in which the automation of the bodies, the subordination of the human to the inhuman, and the multiplicity of the dancers as a sort of “paper people chain” of identical doubles… all contribute to the uncanny effect of this folk dance.

The legs almost move of their own accord. But what’s more disturbing is that the interstitial body — the imaginary one between partners — is missing its head.

Visit the “Eternal Moments” gallery of cinemagraphs by Ana Pais for some stunning moments of the uncanny. The portfolio opens up with a citation from Barthes’ “Camera Lucida” that reads: “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats, what could never be repeated existentially.” Such mechanical forms of repetition are particularly striking when they refer to organic life. These illusory images blur the lines between movement and still images — analogues for life (movement) and death (still) — in a way that generates a spectacularly uncanny effect…mostly because of the intellectual uncertainty that arises when our expectations between visual stasis and activity are foiled.

Cinemagraphs like these are fascinating art experiments, using “animated .gif” techniques. Animation is itself an uncanny artform, because it literally “brings to life” still frames — and while this may in some ways be more apparent in stop-motion techniques (where, I would argue, the jitter produced by editing has as much to do with the uncanny affect as the conceptual “animation” of inanimate objects we see), digital art is offering numerous new ways to trick the eye in uncanny ways.

But when I first saw the striking image above by Pais, my mind went elsewhere: from optical illusions to advertising. I was reminded of automaton-like advertisements that use similar tactics. Like the famous Camel cigarettes billboard that actually blew smoke rings — the one pictured in this shot below from the NY Times is a classic (also see the images and posts at Shorpy.com for more).

'The Sign that Puffed' by Eddie Hausner

There have been some creative reworkings of these billboards that smoke, but they always seem to have to do with life and death, avowed and disavowed by machinery. These are automatons, harbingers of death in a monstrously large scale. While I don’t believe they are used anymore for advertising tobacco (I could be wrong), I recently read of the Avera “Why I’m Alive” campaign which used the smoking billboard in a clever way — to call attention to a smoldering car accident. AdWeek reported last September that the billboards were pulled for being a distraction, because people believed the sign was actually on fire and called 911. But — to come full circle — they’re still being used in a new media advert on their website at whyimalive.com.

The Averna ad campaign is really interesting to me because “Why I’m Alive” is not only a good slogan for an emergency assistance company — in which profiles of survivors are used to personalize their life-and-death experiences — but also a direct expression of one of life’s universal questions: “Why AM I alive?” There is a subtle reference to the supernatural in this, for the “agency” of creation is aligned with the advertising agency.

STRANGE RAIN is a new iphone/ipad application (aka “app”) by Erik Loyer at opertoon.com that, simply, simulates looking through “a skylight on a rainy day.” Rain falls from the cloudy abyss “above” the viewer to splatter down on the glass of the device. Tilt the device and the atmosphere tilts back, too, maintaining a 3-dimensional appearance that makes it genuinely feel like you are looking up through a portable, handheld window into a sky. You can make gestures with your fingers and cause the rain to gather into a column that follows your fingertips. You can tap on the glass and make music…and words begin to flash in “whispers” beside the raindrops…or, if set to “story” mode, the words appear in complete phrases, in errant but profound micro-musings, evoking a narrative (see Holly Willis’ review at KCET for a description of the ‘story’). The game encourages interactive finger-tapping and dragging as it plays musical notes with each touch. Tap quickly, and you “fall in” to the sky, as the clouds above become framed by other clouds…and still more frames of clouds, cascading and creeping in around the edge of the screen, frame inside of frame inside of frame….

It’s a very mellow, hypnotic kind of 21st century phantasmagoria. Words can’t describe it as well as the sample video on their website:

The app is quite simple, even monotonous to a degree, but it seems to be surprisingly popular for what amounts to an interactive haiku (Apple featured it in their Entertainment category, and it hit #1 on Jan 14th). I usually don’t buy these kinds of “eye candy” sorts of things, but there are times when it’s worth it to just kick back and relax with a computer/device and see where the muse takes you. There’s something very “zen” about this sort of application — and as Fast Company points out in their review, there are already a host of other “ambient meditation aids” out there in the ipad/iphone market — and we’ve also had New Media Poetry and other forms of Electronic Literature for decades now — but there’s more to the attraction than its successful application of this genre on the ipad platform. On his blog, the app’s author, Erik Loyer, once referred to this approach to gaming as prompting “casual significance” – taking “a stab in the dark, doing things you’d like to build theories around but shouldn’t, and as such they enable you to walk into the unknown with joy and confidence.” Creative minds need to do that. But that wasn’t the entire draw for me: when I read the description of the app, I immediately noticed how it employed the language of the uncanny, and had to give it a try:

Strange Rain…feels as if you’re holding a living window in your hands. The more you touch, however, the more strange the rain becomes: layered skies, visual anomalies and shifts in speed and color, even the occasional cataclysm if you’re not careful. Before your eyes and beneath your fingers, the familiar becomes strange, and the strange, familiar.

Any reader of Freud would recognize the opposition of the familiar and strange as unheimlich — and it is precisely the tropes of the uncanny, rendered interactive (“beneath your fingers”), which make this “living window” so curiously appealing.

Instructions for Estrangement in Strange Rain

Though the game subtly plays off our instinctive “sky is falling” kind of fear, virtual rainfall in itself is not so disturbing. Yet the effect is uncanny. In a review at iphonefreak.com, Andy Boxall compares the app to a David Lynch film, and in the process nails the reason why: “The oddness comes not only from the appearance of the rain falling from inside your device upwards, but from the discordant tunes you can make while tapping the screen.” Let’s talk about these two elements — the visual and the aural — to probe into what makes this app so “strange.”

In Strange Rain, the world is rendered topsy-turvy because we are so habituated toward thinking that the sky is always fixed in a position up above us. Gravity is a natural law for us. Click on this app with an ipad down on your lap or desktop, and suddenly the world has been turned upside-down, fostering a minor sense of acute weightlessness. “Rain” still “falls” in a natural way, but it does not so much fall down on you as fall at you. This feels a bit threatening, sure, and the inversion of our perspective on the world is felt as threatening because it challenges our sense of mastery over the environment. But that threat is offset by a larger fantasy of control over the environment, too: we can “magically” manipulate — nay, orchestrate — the rain with our fingertips. And who hasn’t wanted to control the weather? Or, to quote the game’s tutorial, “reset the world”?

Yet at the same time, the glass is a persistent barrier in this relationship, and the use of cascading frames as you probe deeper into the game persistently reminds the player that the window remains a medium that enables this “control” but at the same time blocks the user from really ever touching or feeling the water and other elements implied by the game’s diegesis. This is why the music — a pling-plongy waltz of notes that change tempo when you tap — is so important, “framing” the experience as an aesthetic one, set to a soundtrack in the foreground, while the “ambient” sound of rainfall is pushed sonically into the background. Diegetic and extra-diegetic elements compete in a way that render the familiar elements of nature (rainstorm/sky) strange (mediated by sounds/images/words). There is a play, too, between what is pre-programmed and what is randomized by the user, as well as between the inescapability of gravity vs. the mobility of the app, which generates oppositional tension: the game flip-flops the fantasy of mastery over the environment with the feeling that the environment is master over the user.

Perhaps the oppositional tensions I have been describing are a common structural element to most interactive handheld games, but the aesthetic framing of this one explicitly puts such issues in the context of a subjective fantasy about the natural environment, where “thoughts” are projected directly onto the sky. I am reminded of the way we often imagine we see uncanny shapes (animals, faces) in random cloud formations. The uncanny is never really just about “scary” objects, but about the projective fantasies we have that seem to “come to life” with more power than we imagine they might have. Strange Rain dramatizes this fantasy in a contemplative and mesmerizing way.

Visit Erik Loyer’s “Generous Machine” site for more of his projects, which include interactive comics and other ‘virtual windows.’

Strange Rain was also recently reviewed in-depth by CNN, who raises the question, “What exactly is it?” The answer: a postmodern phantasmagoria of the popular uncanny.

“lomography…employs low-quality toy cameras for an intentionally “bad” photograph that is blurry, off-color with light leaks. These photos are more atmospheric but obviously not as accurate. They contribute to an aesthetic of decay that compliments the subject. HDR is too precious to me, too bejewelled and fantastic. Lomography represents a more “accurate” view of the past in that it is hazy, hard to discern, never quite all there”

I’m reminded of horrorshow gimmicks, of course. But looking at the images on this site got me thinking about the way that these photographs not only represent an eerie scene, but how the camera lense substitutes for the healthy eye of the viewer; our very perception is “decayed”…ergo the specter of death is felt as interior, subjective, and what the ph0tograph captures is not a haunted space, but a space which we inhabit and haunt, if only for the the momentary duration of the initial affect of uncanny. (The HDR photographs, too, could be said to similarly introject the subjectivity of the cyborg).

Related, but different: lomography is a nostalgia fetish for toy and archaic/outmoded cameras and film technology of the past. Lomography.com reveals this fascination with toy cameras in all its glory.

In the digital and mobile millennium, we are seeing a shift in the ground of the uncanny, away from the home to the experience of being in the world through its representations of time and place. Analog has become the Other.

Vytorin is a single pill — a drug that combines two different medicines (Zetia and Zocor) to combat the two kinds of cholesterol (generally called “good” and “bad” cholesterol”) which they identify as coming from two different sources (“food & family”). As Time magazine reports, there may be truth in these claims, and also problems with it — but the effectiveness of the drug is not my interest. Instead, I want to focus on how all these “dualities” — of medicine, cholesterol, and its origin — are overdetermined in the advertising, repeating some strangely familiar structures of the Uncanny that we often find in consumer culture. Similar to products like Wrigley’s “Doublemint” Gum, Vytorin lends itself to a marketing campaign that actively employs the figure of the double (der doppelganger) to draw the attention of the consumer. As I argue in The Popular Uncanny, in mass marketing and advertising the structures of the Uncanny often become ambiguously attractive and repulsive representations, reflecting our ambivalent anxieties about consumer culture. Here, the idea that “you are what you eat” is taken quite literally. It’s kind of cute, the first time you see it, but in the endless stream of associative pairings between people and food, one becomes progressively convinced that there is something universal about these claims, and that, perhaps, all food mirrors people (and vice-versa). While this ad — like most pharmaceutical advertising — projects a wish for a miracle cure, the use of doubling is so overdetermined that is also uncannily disturbing, if only because these matings feel predestined and beyond our control.

In the YouTube video above — from Vytorin’s infamously clever television campaign a few years ago — the ad showed a series of screens in which a diversity of overtly costumed actors are associated (first by “dissolves” into a single universal plate, then in panels, side by side on screen) with tasty foods and fancy dishes. The overt correspondences between body morphology, fashion choices, and food dishes is quite striking; the symmetry in design and the patterned replication of color schemes across the frame is orchestrated in a way that one simply cannot overlook the “double” message: people are food. Physical traits as well as personality are “naturally” reflected by our choice in food products. We are what we eat; and in the case of cholesterol, it can kill us, because we can’t help ourselves, and the inheritance of our family lines only affirms this.

This visual personification of ice cream and waffles and hot dogs is more than just clever ad design. Here we have an example of uncanny doubling, but it is different than the traditional “doppelganger” in that we are presented with a live human being whose “alter ego” is the food product — an inanimate (or in the case of meat, dead) object on a plate…a double which the living implicitly consume.

There is a subtle cannibalism at work in the dreamlike psychology here. If you see a scrumptious pile of pancakes in one shot, you probably don’t want to eat the person they associate with it, but the implied message is that these people consume these projections of themselves (and perhaps more subtly, vice-versa). Vytorin is suggesting that some people are “naturally” attracted to foods, no matter how artificial or prepared they might be — and by showing these associations in a lengthy series, subtly argues that this compulsory food choice can be generalized as a “compulsion to repeat” that is, simply, human nature.

The double is the “harbinger of death” and Vytorin presents itself as a cure not for cholesterol, per se, but for our anxiety about our predestined fate. If it is “natural,” moreover, then it is “healthy,” and a manufactured pharmaceutical company obviously benefits from framing itself as a “natural” cure or preventative medicine. Commercial pill brand names often pun on our desire for infinite life and health (as I have argued elsewhere about the pain reliever, Aleve). The name “Vytorin” even sounds life-giving in its prefix (“Vyt-“, implying “vital,” as in “vitamin”), before it battles choles-“tor”-al with its “statIN”-based formula. But beyond that, in the ad, the focus on the communion of “food” and “family” transforms the scary point it makes about the origin of cholesterol into a story of “organic” harmony and healthy wish-fulfillment. All these implicit health claims drive home the subtle message that Vytorin is a healthy choice, enabling you to go ahead and eat whatever you like, because it is your destiny, your nature, and the pill fits into this schema as natural law.

Of course, no matter how healthy and uplifting the product might sound, or even be, the ad benefits, too, from fear, as all advertising does — and with most medical advertising, the fear being alluded to here is the fear of death. If you look like a egg salad, and you compulsively eat egg salad, you are only one step away from becoming the equivalent of egg salad. The blurring of boundaries between signifier and signified is an ambivalence that is both cutely humorous and darkly scary. The harbinger of death is the uncanny double.

Last year, writer Jason Jack Miller shared with me a popular YouTube video: Uncanny monsters born by placing a layer of water and cornstarch on a subwoofer. I find myself returning to this video often, contemplating the animism made possible by the rhythm of sound and the chaos of vibration. This neat effect “animates” the preternatural spatzle dough (a.k.a. “Oobleck”) in a way that makes it seem like the liquid gives birth to monstrous blobs that have a will to dance all their own. It gets progressively creepier until the “mass” writhes with uncanny life.

One of the reasons this neat trickery appeals to me is because it is also so familiar from fiction and film. This is but one of many examples of something we might call the “Oobleck Effect” in uncanny narratives: a representation of “living fluid” in the works of popular culture (especially film). Liquid, by its very nature, often seems animate since it is subject to gravity and other forms of push-and-pull in the natural environment. Ocean waves are scientifically explained, but one can’t help but wonder at the unseen forces that cause the phenomena — a ripple is a ghostly after-trace of an often unseen and unknown activity. Things stir underwater, and we see this after-effect — something is “there” but not quite there at all. Shark films like Open Water achieve much of their horror this way, by giving us a partial view — fin breaking through or not — as things move beneath the surface of the visible. But the Oobleck Effect is achieved when the surface itself takes on life before our very eyes in a zone where we presumed there was no life whatsoever. When liquid shapes are represented as “alive” in the arts, they become particularly uncanny objects. It is as though an unseen chaotic cluster of cells has consciously grouped to become an organic system. Perhaps, too, this is disturbing because their monstrous bodies perform a sort of polymorphous perversity as much as they erase categorical distinctions based on physical boundaries which inherently questions the “natural” laws that we presume shape all organisms in any determined way. The liquid itself is as “alive”; we project sentience, if not outright ill intention, upon the chaos, suddenly embodied.

Oobleck — a word that itself is derived from pop literature (Dr. Seuss) — is common in popular culture that employs spectacle to mesmerize audiences, particularly in visual media which can bend liquid forms (or liquify) via Computer Graphic Imaging. For example, the effect is readily apparent in the image of the T-1000 (or the “liquid metal” robot) from Terminator 2: Judgment Day who, by virtue of spectacular effects, seems as polymorphic as a postmodern shape-shifter, his metallic alloy bendable into any horrifying shape that will serve the purpose of disguise or murder. The disguise function renders it an instant “double” when it transforms into replicating the visage of a recent victim (a la John Carpenter’s The Thing); the polymorphic function allows it to spring a long spike from a forefinger. The robot double of modernism takes on a postmodern assemblage, as the uncanny is escalated in a way that challenges any notion of a stable, organic identity — even in the “double” itself. Instead, the oobleck effect is a generalized process of the Other in transformation. When the T-1000 is melted in the lava-like smelt of the factory at the end of T2, his liquid body expresses numerous characters as he is returned to the mercurial hellfire — and this scene, as much as the one where he emerges from a puddle on a hospital room floor, is perhaps the best example of the Oobleck Effect at work in contemporary cinema.

The T-1000 is an iconic instance of the Oobleck Effect

I invite comments that cite other appearances of the Oobleck Effect in fiction, film and elsewhere in pop culture.

Neat find: Professor Heard’s Magic Latern Shows is a traveling act that nostalgically recreates the “phantasmagoria” of the 18th & 19th centuries for contemporary audiences. (I learned about Heard’s show via his article, “The Lantern of Fear” published by Grand Illusions, a fun online shop for offbeat science toys, uncanny gizmos, and illusionary devices.) As I further pursued this, I found that magic lantern shows and phantasmagoria are still very much a living art. The question I have is whether these are quaint celebrations of our domestication of their uncanny spectacle, or does the nostalgia for these “dead” technologies make their apparitions all the more uncanny?

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On the Uncanny…

An uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed….these two classes of uncanny experience are not always sharply distinguishable.— Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919)